UK’s drifting away is a reality check for the EU

Commentary: Cameron is right to call for new direction in integration

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — British Prime Minister David Cameron has got it right about Europe.

In a speech to be delivered Wednesday, Cameron is expected to warn his fellow leaders in the European Union that his country will “drift” toward an exit if the union doesn’t change the way it makes decisions.

What he means is that Britain wants to be free to choose just how much it wants to be integrated into Europe — which is not as much as some others.

Reuters

Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron plans to force a new relationship with the European Union.

Cameron is talking about Britain renegotiating its relationship with the EU and submitting those new terms to British voters in a referendum.

Spurred by the ongoing euro crisis and under pressure from Euroskeptics in his Conservative Party, Cameron is ready to open a new chapter in Britain’s fitful relationship with the EU.

He originally planned to give the speech last week in Amsterdam, but the Algerian hostage crisis forced a postponement. He is now set to give it Wednesday in London.

EU officials have dismissed the idea that any member can “renegotiate” particular terms of adherence. Cameron is adopting this stance in part to avoid a straight up-and-down referendum on membership demanded by anti-Europe members in his ranks.

Britain, which historically has seen itself as something apart from continental Europe, was not one of the six founding members of the EU predecessors in the 1950s, and did not join the European Communities in 1967 when it was formed to consolidate the various groupings.

It was only in 1973 that British business interests pushed Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath to finally join the EC. The opposition Labour Party at that time resisted membership, and Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson held a referendum on membership in 1975, which resulted in a two-thirds vote in favor of staying in.

But Britain continued to resist the movement toward greater integration and balked at joining the common currency
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when it was set up in the 1990s.

As a result, Britain has maintained sovereignty over its currency
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and has largely avoided being drawn into the euro crisis, even though Cameron has foisted his own set of misguided austerity policies on the country that have kept it mired in recession.

But the response of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brussels officials to the crisis has been to call for greater fiscal integration and banking union, and Britain, which at this point has no intention of joining the euro, doesn’t want to go down that path and is worried about its status if the others do.

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In his speech this week, Cameron is expected to once again complain about the lack of democratic accountability in the EU, but that does not mean he wants to be part of a political integration that would transfer full legislative powers to the European Parliament.

The long and short of it is that Britain does not now or in the foreseeable future want to be part of a United States of Europe.

Even the Labour Party, which in the meantime has become pro-Europe even as Conservatives have become more anti-Europe, last week ruled out such a goal.

“European unity is not — and must not — be defined as uniform purpose towards a common federal government or the merging of national identities into a United States of Europe,” Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander said in a speech meant to pre-empt Cameron’s originally scheduled announcement. “Instead Labour’s vision of Europe is a flexible Europe with a common political framework that can permanently accommodate varying levels of integration amongst member states.”

That’s not much different than what Cameron wants, but Labour wants to avoid the uncertainty created by calling for a referendum.

The uncertainty is there, however, with or without a referendum scheduled for sometime after 2015. Whether through renegotiated terms of membership or an exit from the EU and a back-door re-entry through a series of bilateral treaties like those concluded by Switzerland to get economic integration on its terms, Britain will go its own direction and not join Germany and France down the road to a full-fledged fiscal and political union.

It’s not very likely that voters in Germany or France want to go down that road, either, so Cameron’s call is a reality check for the plans envisioned by the Eurocrats in Brussels.

Given Europe’s long history and diverse cultural identities, a United States of Europe has never been a realistic goal. A more free-wheeling set of overlapping entities, as envisioned by both parties in Britain, would be much more in step with historic European groupings like the Holy Roman Empire or the Hanseatic League.

Whether Cameron’s stand now will be sufficient to stop the institutional momentum committed to preserving the euro and all that entails remains to be seen, but he is right to call the current direction of the EU into question.

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